Editing Template:Taxobox colour/doc (section)

== Purpose ==
This template is one of a number of configuration templates used in the taxobox system, in this case in both [[Template:Taxobox|manual]] and [[WP:Automated taxobox system|automated taxoboxes]].

It generates the appropriate colour for a taxobox.

It should only be used by other taxobox templates.

=== Use by taxonomy templates ===
Manual taxoboxes call this template from {{tl|Taxobox}}, which looks at the values of ranks given in the taxobox from phylum upwards and uses the taxobox colour for the first colour-setting taxon found (or the error colour if none is found). {{tl|Sets taxobox colour}} is used to decide whether a taxon is colour-setting, which it does by using this template.

Automated taxoboxes use a function in [[Module:Autotaxobox]], which finds a colour-setting taxon by searching up the taxonomic hierarchy coded in taxonomy templates (i.e. templates with names of the form "Taxonomy/''taxon-name''").

=== Setting colour within a taxobox ===
Both manual and automatic taxoboxes usually generate their colours automatically. If this fails, or if for some reason the automatically generated colour should be over-ridden, {{para|color_as}} can be used to set the colour based on a supplied taxon. Thus:
<syntaxhighlight lang="wikitext">| color_as = Animalia
</syntaxhighlight>
within a taxobox forces its colour to be the one appropriate for animal taxoboxes. The taxon given as the value of {{para|color_as}} must be in the switch statement in this template. Thus {{para|color_as|Felis}} fails and assigns the error colour.